My early years I worked on international FMCGs, initially on the sales side. Every year we’d attend new product launches, to learn the story behind these innovations, and how to take them to market. The presentations impressed, the samples looked great and the booze flowed freely. But I noticed an interesting dynamic; sales people have very mixed feelings about innovation. We loved the excitement of new products, but there was a strong undercurrent of: ‘That won’t work for my customer!’ As one of the young bucks, it was easy for me to dismiss this as cynicism from old hands, but that didn’t really stack up when the resisters were some of the highest performers with the deepest and longest relationships with their clients.

Later on, I moved into the brand marketing team of another food company, and got to experience innovation from the other end. Months were spent preparing research reports; correlating data, focus groups, and market testing in pursuit of the right products to back and take to market. I’ll admit to having a certain ‘sniffiness’ back then about feedback from the sales guys. We marketers were precious about how we owned the voice of the consumer, and we had solid research to back up our viewpoint. We knew what the market needed, and we owned the innovation funnel! The sales guys just needed to do what they were brilliant at: Execution. So marketing is closest to research and customer insights, but sales is closest to retailers and distributors and via them, the end users. Which is best placed to own innovation? And which should be ‘doing’ the innovation? I’d hope for most of us it’s a trick question. Nearly 3,000 new food and drink products were launched in 1995, the year before I started that first role. The success rate was less than 10%. That’s a lot of investments not making any return. It’s no surprise that the breakthrough food launches of the past 15 years are now some of the most envied – and cited as case studies – Innocent Drinks, Gu puds and the like. Hats off to them: survival of the fittest. But there’s another kind of innovation which can complement those silver bullet ideas, and it’s often of most value to organizations and those who lead them. It’s low cost, fast win and builds lower risk incremental changes. It’s what can happen when people are purposefully brought together every week to have conversations about how they can improve their own business. When they’re allowed and expected to explore new ideas: Not ideas about what other teams need to do for them; not what they’d do if they had more cash or resource; but what they can do between them, right now to improve performance. I’m a fan of one engineering organization that put this into practice. The theme was ‘Understanding our customers’. A factory operative shared that he’d been thinking about how customers want product quicker, yet factory bottlenecks could be a limitation to lead times. His idea to transform the customer experience was ‘I’d like to move the scales 20 metres to over here’. That would help him weigh more widgets, quicker. No one objected, and in fact others noticed that the move would save them some time too. So they got on and did it. The fresh looking floor underneath suggested it had been a long time since those scales had been moved. This micro improvement worked, no one was adversely affected and it saved 20 minutes a week in the factory. The financial director couldn’t resist doing the maths. By his reckoning, it saved them £20,000 per year. Just by moving some scales. Their new MD asked how long the scales had been in the previous position. The answer was 15 years. That’s a £300,000 opportunity cost in today’s money. He kept digging, curious to know why no one had thought of this earlier. Everyone had been through plenty of process training. It’s my belief that the answer he was given strikes to the heart of the innovation challenge today. He was simply told ‘We’ve never made a habit of talking to each other like this before’. And there’s the rub. If we all agree that innovation is everyone’s job and that communication is the key to unlocking it, wouldn’t we all prefer to unlock lots of £20k ideas rather than crossing our fingers that the next multimillion idea will be a blockbuster. But collaboration doesn't just happen, and the kind of ‘communication’ that works in one organization might bomb in another. I prefer to take an emergent approach: Part art, part science, it’s where good practice, grounded leadership, pragmatic processes and employee engagement collide. It’s the bit I love exploring with clients, because I love to see the good that flows when people start talking, and get into working together on what matters most. Who knows? It could even be the magic that brings sales people and marketers together one day!

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